Yes, there is. Read my post above and go take a college level music theory course.
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Learning notes on fretboard: B#, Cb, E# and Fb?!
- Thread starter OldSchoolFlats
- Start date
If you haven't seen Victor Wooten talk about some of this theory stuff, you should do a deep dive, he's got a great way of explaining stuff that is 1) more correct than what they teach you in music school, and 2) understandable to people who didn't go to music school. When you're talking sharps and flats, this is the critical response:
Yes, I understand that now. I was just referring to the way I talk about the notes on the neck. For example, I would never say a song is in B# cuz B# is C or I would never say it's in the key of E#, cuz E# is F.
Yeah, as much as we would all like to pretend sharp keys don't exist ... there they are!
Just played Paul McCartneys' Penny Lane this morning. It is in key of concert B.
No theory expert by any means (although I do have a theoretical background in my profession, which is not in the music business). My understanding is that music comes first and theory follows in order to rationalize music that sounds good in contrast to music (or sounds) that don't sound good, when played together or whatever. Therefore theory helps facilitate learning but is not what gives notes their aesthetic value. So in that respect, all positions on the neck of the bass have the same value and importance, musically and ethically speaking, if I may so put it. It makes no difference, if it's C or C# or whatever. If it is the note you like or the note you're looking for or the note that sounds good along the rest of whatever music is going on at any given time, then THIS is the note you want regardless of its designated name. It has its own independent value, in itself. The only slight impractical complication is the the accidentals have two names as they can be considered, in relation to the adjacent notes, going up or down the neck. Of course, conventionally some notes are considered more important than others, it's a power game that has to do with politics. So this is my relativist post-modern music theory. 
No theory expert by any means (although I do have a theoretical background in my profession, which is not in the music business). My understanding is that music comes first and theory follows in order to rationalize music that sounds good in contrast to music (or sounds) that don't sound good, when played together or whatever. Therefore theory helps facilitate learning but is not what gives notes their aesthetic value. So in that respect, all positions on the neck of the bass have the same value and importance, musically and ethically speaking, if I may so put it. It makes no difference, if it's C or C# or whatever. If it is the note you like or the note you're looking for or the note that sounds good along the rest of whatever music is going on at any given time, then THIS is the note you want regardless of its designated name. It has its own independent value, in itself. The only slight impractical complication is the the accidentals have two names as they can be considered, in relation to the adjacent notes, going up or down the neck. Of course, conventionally some notes are considered more important than others, it's a power game that has to do with politics. So this is my relativist post-modern music theory.
I do think the theory has some basis in physics though: how strings vibrate, and the over-tones.
While it has been 40 years, I took a "physics of sound" course that went into sound, and I saw relationships to music theory. The bass is actually quite important. The ear hears all instruments at the same time, and how the notes they play interact. If the bass is off, everything is off. Melody instruments can take more "liberties", since they are dealing with higher frequencies/harmonics.
Well, yes. It's a global plot, all instruments are involved in it.
Joking aside, I was only pretending to be a relativist in my previous post. Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken, was the first to relate the notes to integer subdivisions of the length of the string(s) and thus lay the foundation of western musical theory not on relative but on absolute grounds. As a philosopher he was a diehard idealist after all.
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Sure it is. It's just not a practical key when we can use Ab Major instead. But "in theory", which of course is literally the mathematical logic behind all of this stuff, it is a valid key. Impractical, but valid. Also it is the "correct" key for certain mathematically-perfect compositions to use briefly due to key relationships, although again it's avoided for long periods.
Edit:
I just googled and found a much better description of it than I just gave:
G-sharp major - Wikipedia
It's not as complex as you may be making it. However, I say that having read music for 30 years, most of it within the more "normal" key signatures of five or fewer accidentals, and most of that for voice, where the intervals between notes are emphasized over the names of each specific note on the staff (because your voice doesn't have fingerings or slide positions to produce each note you see on the staff; you have to listen and intuitively feel each note). I actually approach the bass in a similar way, thinking more in terms of intervals through the line than note names on the staff. As a result, I suck pretty bad at sightreading for bass.
To learn why notes are named the way they are, study the "Guidonian Hand", a mnemonic device create by Guido of Arezzo in the 12th Century to teach sight-singing. This system gives us the syllables of "solfege", "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do". The lowest note in the standard range of this system was called "gamma-ut", named for Guido himself and the first syllable of the Vespers hymn he used in the treatise describing the system, "Ut Queant Laxis". The hexachord then proceeded through six tones, with one "half-step" between "mi" and "fa", and a gap from "la" to the octave of "ut".
To fill that gap, Guido showed that you can "mutate" the hexachord, shifting the sequence of tones from the original "ut" or "do" tone to the "fa" of that hexachord, and constructing a new hexachord from there. With "gamma-ut" being the base note, then looping from there to "A" and continuing through the first mutation for one octave of notes, the note names and pitches are G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G, exactly as they're played on any modern instrument. In modern music theory, this is the G Mixolydian mode, and it is important in rock music for that bluesy minor seventh. The progression through these tones beginning from the base of the Roman alphabet, "A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A", is the natural minor scale, also supremely important in modern music.
Now, if you "mutate the mutation", creating a third hexachord by shifting to "fa" of the second hexachord (the note named C) and continuing up, an interesting thing happens: you get two notes named B, that aren't a perfect octave apart. The higher one ends up a half-step low. Both notes were, in medieval music, considered valid; the one produced by the second mutation was called "molle" or "soft" and notated in lowercase, making the scale from the second through third hexachords C-D-E-F-G-A-b-C. We've kept that lowercase "b" in modern notation as the "accidental" for flatted notes, ♭.
To solve the discrepancy, Guido showed it was also permissible to create this second mutation by shifting to "sol" instead of "fa". If you alternate mutations to the fourth, then to the fifth, etc, all the note names line up from lower octaves (because an octave is the fifth of the fourth, or the fourth of the fifth; these intervals are called "perfect" for these and other reasons). Starting from the first mutation and proceeding through the second using a mutation to "sol", the note names are C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. This progression is what we know as the "major scale", and it is of course supremely important in modern music.
In the Renaissance, Catholic monks rediscovered the ancient Greek mathematical tonal system attributed to Pythagoras. Beginning with the harmonic series of a vibrating string (or a horn of constant length), trivially expressed using the unit fractions, Pythagoras created an equivalent series using powers of the ratio 3:2. This system described all the notes produced by harmonic partials, and predicted additional notes within the span of an octave. The twelve tones predicted by this system also overlapped with Guido's Gamma-Ut hexachords, including both versions of B, however it predicted other half-step notes in between the hexachord notes, which were at the time the only ones considered acceptable for sacred music.
The additional tones gradually gained acceptance as "molle" variants of the tone above them. Except that the named notes already contained two half-step intervals; the B-C and E-F intervals had no shorter "molle" interval possible between them. So, we simply don't have them.
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Anyway, my suggestion is simply to internalize the weirdness. Cb = B, and E# = F. These two are going to be the more commonly seen notations compared to B# and Fb, because of the nature of key signatures in the Circle of Fifths. In much more concise terms, the key signature with seven flats is enharmonic with the key that has five sharps, and likewise the key with seven sharps is enharmonic with the key that has five flats. Printers will tend to try to make their lives easier and also maximize the space on each staff available for note placement, so they'll use the key signature with the least accidentals. The key signatures with six accidentals - Gb and F# - are enharmonic, and both will use an accidental that is enharmonic with a natural note (Cb and E# respectively). So, there's really no way around this, you just have to intuitively grasp what these notes "really" are on the fretboard.
Personally I've seen Gb more commonly than F#, but that's likely because I trained on low brass in school. In US ensembles, the trombone, euphonium and tuba are all commonly written in "concert pitch", that is, the instrument plays the pitch corresponding to the note written (even if the partial tuning isn't the same, such as the euphoniums and tubas tuned to the Bb partial series). The single reeds and the treble brass are, for historical reasons, all commonly transposed instruments (you will occasionally see a part for cornet in C, that's about the only exception), and with the exception of the clarinet in A (commonly seen as a pair with the more common Bb, used by orchestral clarinetists), they're all transposed to flat keys; their written C is actually a Bb (most common), an Eb or (for alto sax) an Ab. To make life easier for those instruments, most pieces for wind ensemble/military band are written in flat keys, so they see one to three sharps or flats, meanwhile the low brass sees four, five or six flats. So, I got used to reading flat keys and thinking of enharmonic accidentals as their "flat" names a long time ago, and it stuck. An orchestra student, on the other hand, will likely be more comfortable reading "sharps", as the patterns making use of the open strings will have from one to four sharps in the signature. That translates to bass guitar, which in standard tuning uses the same notes and intervals as the double bass.
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I created this image back when I was first learning bass. The link I share it from is not my page. Somehow, my image has traversed the internet many times now, but it doesn't bother me that they use it...
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This may help with learning the fretboard...
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This may help with learning the fretboard...
Some of the responses in this thread leave a lot to be desired....
I can promise you now I have read E#'s Cb's etc countless times. I've even read Ex and Bx and all sorts. Doing theatre pit work you'll see all the horrible stuff you don't want to see coming at you and you have to sight read it. I've seen them in big band charts and other stuff, if you get called to do reading gigs you'll be eventually read this stuff.
Keys like Cb and and C# aren't difficult. They are built the same way as all the other major keys, follow the same patterns and structure and the same harmony exists in them. Because we choose to think about it in B so often we end up making those keys, which are just unfamiliar, seem difficult but once you get over that initial fear you'll find they are just as straight forward as the ones we all know and love.
To answer the question of how to learn and get better acquainted with those. Find music written in those keys, and keys that include those accidentals and play them! Better yet, take music you can already read and rewrite it in those keys. Or, take that diagram and draw up your own including those pitches.
Seriously, 10 minutes with a pencil, pen, paper and a ruler. You'll thank yourself down the line doing it that way.
I can promise you now I have read E#'s Cb's etc countless times. I've even read Ex and Bx and all sorts. Doing theatre pit work you'll see all the horrible stuff you don't want to see coming at you and you have to sight read it. I've seen them in big band charts and other stuff, if you get called to do reading gigs you'll be eventually read this stuff.
Keys like Cb and and C# aren't difficult. They are built the same way as all the other major keys, follow the same patterns and structure and the same harmony exists in them. Because we choose to think about it in B so often we end up making those keys, which are just unfamiliar, seem difficult but once you get over that initial fear you'll find they are just as straight forward as the ones we all know and love.
To answer the question of how to learn and get better acquainted with those. Find music written in those keys, and keys that include those accidentals and play them! Better yet, take music you can already read and rewrite it in those keys. Or, take that diagram and draw up your own including those pitches.
Seriously, 10 minutes with a pencil, pen, paper and a ruler. You'll thank yourself down the line doing it that way.
Start out with a song with a simpler bass line, like the Beatles "One after Nine-0-Nine."
Well, maybe. During this time the Beatles with George Martin, Geoff Emerick and the rest of the Abbey Road crew were experimenting with tape loops and speeds and other recording techniques for effect and different tonalities. So there is very little on the recordings made at this time (mid '66 through the end of '67), that when played at conventional speed on a player, reflect the "key" in which any particular part or track was originally recorded. To my ears, the recording we all have come to know from the original pressing sits between the key of B and the key of C after all the processing and the application of tape speed and other effects.
Do you perhaps know where the names of the modes/scales come from, why, and since when? They're all greek names, obviously, but why these specific ones? Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.
No, I haven't-most sane composers never write in "C#"- they write it in Db. C# Minor? Of course, that isn't a big deal. But C#? Dude, write it in Db. I arrange and write a lot of sheet music, and I would never write in C# major. Ick.
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